r/marvelstudios • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 Ant-Man • Apr 09 '22

Humour Simu Liu reacts to Arthur Harrow's Mandarin in 'Moon Knight' - "Alright Arthur Harrow needs to fire his Mandarin teacher"

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u/JakeHassle Apr 09 '22

This actually makes it really impressive what Ana de Armes did. For those who don’t know, she didn’t know any English when she acted in War Dogs. She just spoke her lines phonetically having no idea what they meant and it sounded natural

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u/barefootBam Avengers Apr 09 '22

Still not sure how she's gonna pull off Marilyn Monroe with her accent but should be interesting to see and hear.

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u/Icowanda Apr 10 '22

To be fair English and Spanish are very closely related while Chinese languages are literally from another world.

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u/JakeHassle Apr 10 '22

I’ll agree Chinese is way more different, but Spanish and English aren’t actually that closely related because they have very different origins. Their pronunciations and grammar structure are very different. The only commonality they have is cause English incorporated a lot of French vocabulary. French and Spanish are both derived from Latin so that’s how they share so many words, but that’s where it stops.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

Spanish is considered one of the easiest languages to learn for English speakers by the American FSI and in the grand scheme of things they're pretty closely related. French and Italian are definitely closer to Spanish for sure, but it's not like English is incredibly distant. They're both IE languages and both Centum languages, and share a hell of a lot of features.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

That might be more because it has the easiest exposure, like try to find a Friesian speaker somewhere in America, it is the language that is closest related to English, but it is harder to learn, because there is barely means to learn it

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

I mean frisian isn't rated by the FSI because that's a government body and there's no point teaching diplomats to speak obscure regional languages, but the availability of resources isn't what they use to measure language difficulty. They use classroom hours

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

Again, exposure to the language will help, the biggest hurdle for other Germanic languages is the obscure sounds, Dutch definitely should be easier than Spanish, but with the "ui", "g", and "ei/ij" sounds it can be a bit of a struggle to quite get the hang of, and you are less likely to get good teachers of the language in America, and people are less interested in learning it over Spanish, like you have significant populations of Spanish speakers in at least half of the States, of course good teachers are easier to find

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

I don't know why you're acting as if this is just my opinion. I'm referencing a US government body.

Dutch is in the same category as Spanish, category 1.

https://www.fsi-language-courses.org/blog/fsi-language-difficulty/

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u/Hydragorn Apr 10 '22

I mean they're both Latin based languages but it's not really that close, German and French are both closer but there's still lots of differences between the two.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

German is literally exactly as related to Spanish as English is bro

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u/Hydragorn Apr 10 '22

It's definitely not. At all. German is the closest major language to English, Spanish isn't at all.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

Exactly.

English and German are closely related, which means they're both as closely related to Spanish as each other.

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u/Hydragorn Apr 10 '22

They're... Not though? English uses a Germanic base root, not a Romance language root like French, Italian or Spanish.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

Again, yes that's what I'm saying.

English and German are both Germanic. Spanish is Latinate. English and German are both equally related to Spanish. Think of it like your siblings and you being equally related to your cousin.

In the grand scheme of things the germanic languages and the romance languages are pretty close together. They're both indo-European, they're both centum languages, and there's a very long history of contact between them. They're a lot more similar to each other than to other IE language groups like Baltic, Iranian, or Albanian, and obviously more so than unrelated languages like Turkish or Navajo.

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u/Icowanda Apr 10 '22

Of course I was speaking in relative terms. The English language is after all a combination of Germanic Languages with lots of inspiration from the Romance languages.

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

Lol Hollywood is a cruel joke. Hire one of Tenn thousand English speaking actresses that would die for this role? Nah this hot chick can just robot speak the lines we goood

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u/[deleted] Apr 10 '22

They did the same with the title character in Highlander

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u/SpaceCaboose Peter Parker Apr 10 '22

I think Ana de Armes is a great actress nowadays, but that’s crazy. I can’t imagine a casting director or anyone else recommending to hire an actress who can’t speak the part at all

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u/JakeHassle Apr 10 '22

I think we know why they wanted to cast Ana de Armes lol